FDA investigators find sanitary horrors at Iowa egg farms

Yahoo News, By Brett Michael Dykes

Have you eaten lunch yet? If not, you may want to hold off on reading this until later. Then again, if you were planning on eating eggs or products containing eggs for lunch, well, sit down and brace yourself.

Surely by now you've heard about the massive egg recall from two enormous farms in Iowa. But you probably didn't know what greeted FDA investigators inspecting the two facilities: According to the Washington Post's Lyndsey Layton, they found "piles of manure up to eight feet tall, live mice, pigeons and other birds inside the hen houses." Layton also says that investigators noted "dead maggots and live flies that crunched under foot at Wright County Egg, where the FDA also documented a hen house bulging from manure."

Yeesh. So much for that whole "incredible edible egg" ad slogan.

After a salmonella outbreak sparked a federal recall of nearly 500 million eggs, the FDA announced that it would send investigators to every large egg farm in the nation for inspections. The two Iowa farms -- Wright County Egg and Hillandale Farms -- were the first stops on the regulators' itinerary. Both facilities are responsible for the largest salmonella outbreak since the government began monitoring for the disease almost 40 years ago. At Hillandale, investigators found that salmonella had even contaminated the water used to wash the eggs.

As ProPublica noted, both farms are linked to Jack DeCoster, a farming mogul who's broken a staggering number of environmental regulations over the years. DeCoster's farms have also drawn frequent complaints of labor violations affecting a workforce made up mainly of Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal. In 1997, then-Labor Secretary Robert Reich called working conditions at DeCoster's farms "as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop."

These kinds of complaints are distressingly common among food producers. The 2009 documentary "Food Inc." highlighted many of the same disturbing labor and sanitary practices. Small wonder that the "local food" movement is thriving.

(Photo via AP/M. Spencer Green)